Conference Pap-=-e-=--f
_
"TOLSTOY OR DOSTOEVSKY" AND THE MODERNISTS: POLEMICS WITH JOSEPH BRODSKY
Galya Diment, University of Washington
It is no secret that many influential Russian intellectuals have
been partial to stark and dramatic oppositions resulting in antagonistically dichotomous paradigms.
One of the more famous of these is the
model which pits Tolstoy against Dostoevsky as writers who, to use
Berdyaev's description, appealed to two ,distinct "types among men's souls,
the one inclined toward the spirit of Tolstoy, the other toward that of
Dostoevsky" (quoted in Steiner, 10). Following the lead of the Russians,
George Steiner even went as far as to signify by the very title of his
1959 book- -Tolstoy or Dostoevsky- - the absolute necessity for making a
choice between the two authors. Recently Joseph Brodsky took the case of
Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky one step further by using the paradigm as a symbol
of a "fork" or crossroads faced by twentieth century Russian literature.
"Russian prose went with Tolstoy only too glad to spare itself climbing
the heights of Dostoevsky's spiritual pitch," writes
Brodsky in
"Catastrophes in the Air." " ... [T]he road not taken was the road that led
to modernism, as is evidenced by the influence of Dostoevsky on every
major wrlter in this century. from Kafka on.
The road taken led to the
literature of socialist realism"
(Brodsky,
277,
280).
Brodsky's
statement, which, judging by recent conference papers, appears to be
shared by some Slavists,' is immensely arguable, if not downright
erroneous.
Many of the leading European. modernists, among them James
Joyce. Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov and even Franz
Kafka, whom the poet mentions, would have strongly disagreed with
Brodsky's bold assessment as to who was their direct precursor.
At the very least, many writers in the twenties considered both
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as equally worthy of study and consideration. Thus
Franz Kafka, while obviously drawn to Dostoevsky and inclined to defend
him against Max Brod' s attacks (see Kafka, Diaries, 104). repea tedly
admitted to having been profoundly moved and even influenced by Tolstoy
and especially "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (see Kafka, Diaries 11.201;
Letters 189, 319). E. M. Forster summed up this feeling of awe for both
IFor example, at the 1989 AAASS convention in Chicago, Irina Gutkin used
Brodsky's article as the backbone for her paper tI In Search of a New Tolstoy:
The Soviet Novel in the 19305."
76
writers among his contemporaries when he noted in Aspects of the Novel
that "No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy--that is to say has given
so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side.
No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as Dostoevsky"
(Forster, 7).
Echoing her friend, Virginia Woolf also characterized the
difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky not in terms of stature or
importance but along the lines of "Life" and "Soul":
"Life dominaees
Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky" (Woolf, Common Reader, 186).
Early on, as becomes obvious in her 1912 letter to Lytton
Strachey, Uoolf did believe that the future of English prose was
inseparable from the influence of Dostoevsky:
"It is directly obvious
that he is the greatest writer ever born:
and if he chooses to become
horrible what will happen to us?" (Woolf, Letters, II,S).
But even in
this statement one can already feel the writer's apprehension as to the
nature of Dostoevsky's impact.
She knows that English literature cannoe
possibly remain the same having corne under Dostoevsky's spell- - "The novels
of Dostoevsky," she wrote in "The Russian Point of View," "are seething
whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck
us in. . .. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded,
suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture" (Uoolf,
Common Reader, 182).
But she also knows that the union between the
Russian and
English sensibilities will be
far
from harmonious:
"Dostoevsky--the ruin of English literature," she recorded in her diary
in 1922 (Uoolf, Diary, II, 203).
She bach desired such an apocalyptic
outcome and feared it. She wanted Dostoevsky to shake up the conventional
readers' comfort·-"Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and battered
on the stones at the bottom, it is difficult for an English reader co feel
at ease" (Uoolf, Common Reader, 184)--yet the deadly-serious qualiey of
Dostoevsky's "soul" was rather alien to her·-HIt has little sense of
humour and no sense of comedy.
I t is formless" (Wool f, Common Reader,
182).
Interestingly enough, even D. H. Lawrence, who himself is often
accused of being rather humorless, had little tolerance for that quality
of Dostoevsky's soul.
"The more Dostoievsky gets worked up about the
tragic nature of the human soul," he wrote in a 1930 review, "the more I
lose interest" (Lawrence, 245-246).
Ironically, it is this very ability
of Dostoevsky to "push ... his soul beyond the confines of his creed"
(Brodsky, 161) that Brodsky sees as one of the writer's main contributions
to European modernism.
Uoolf's critical responses to Tolstoy are much less ambivalent.
By the early twenties it is no longer Dostoevsky but Tolstoy who, in
Uoolf's revised estimate, is "the greatest of all novelists."
"Nothing
seems to escape him," she writes in Common Reader.
"Nothing glances off
him unrecorded .... He nocices the blue or red of a child's frock; the way
a horse shifts its tail: the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying
to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up .... There is always
at the cen~re of the book some Olenin, or Pierre, or Levin who gathers
into himself all experience, turns the world round between his fingers,
and never ceases to ask even as he enjoys it what is the meaning of it,
and what should be our aims" (Uoolf, Common Reader, 185, 186). He was to
her "the mosc .. inspiring, rousing genius in the raw" (Woolf, Diary V,
77
273) and, unlike Brodsky, who thinks that Tolstoy "cook the idea of art
reflecting reality a bit too literally" (Brodsky, 275), Woolf felt chat
the author of Anna Karenina never confused reflecting life with
"photographic realism" (Woolf, Diary, V, ~73).
Despite all her
unsimilar to Brodsky's,
attraction to him. that
been reading ... Tolstoy,"
admiration, Woolf did corne to a realization, not
that it was a response against Tolstoy, not an
eventually led to the rise of modernism.
"I've
she wrote in one of her letters in 1929.
Practically every scene in Anna Karenina is
branded on me. though I've not read it for
IS years.
That is the origin of all our
discontent. After that of course we had to
break away. It wasn't Wells, or Galsworthy
or
any
of
our mediocre
Wishy
washy
realists: it was Tolstoy. How could we go
on with sex and realism after that ... ? It
is one brain, after all, literature; and it
wants change and relief... (Woo if, Diary,
IV, 4).
Yet her conclusion is qualitatively, different from Brodsky's.
According to Woolf, it was because of Tolstoy's very greacness that he had
to be abandoned: Tolstoy had perfected the art of realistic presentation
co such an extent that he simply left no further avenues to explore. This
is a far cry from Brodsky's easy dismissal of Tolstoy's value altogether,
as when he laments the unfortunate fate of his native literature:
The proximity of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in
time was the unhappiesc coincidence tn the
history
of
Russian
literature.
The
consequences of it were such that perhaps
the only way Providence can defend itself
against charges of playing tricks with the
spiritual makeup of a great nation is by
saying that this way it prevented the
Russians from getting too close to its
secrets .... Dostoevsky went perhaps coo high
for Providence's liking.
So it sends in a
Tolstoy as if to ensure that Dostoevsky in
Russia gets no concinuum" (Brodsky, 276).
Brodsky's statement about the opposite directions of Dostoevsky's
and Tolstoy's roads does not at all reflect the experiences of two other
important European modernists- -Joyce and Nabokov.
For while Woolf, at
least, appears to vacillate between the importance of the two Russians,
neither Joyce nor Nabokov held Dostoevsky in any great esteem, turning
instead to Tolstoy for guidance and even inspiration. The case of Joyce's
affinity for Tolstoy has been widely commenced on by a number of scholars,
78
among them Richard Ellmann and John Henry Raleigh. 2 Joyce's interest in
Tols toy could be traced to his early youth and could, back then, be
rivaled only by his love for Ibsen.
As early as 1901, when Joyce was
merely nineteen, he suggested in hThe Day of the Rabblement h that the
Irish Literary Theatre should produce both Ibsen and Tolstoy (hThe
Dominion of Darkness") to upgrade its unimpressive repertoire (Joyce,
Critical Writings, 70), and, as his brother Stanislaus tells us, spent:
countless hours
reading Tolstoy's works at
the National Library
(Stanislaus Joyce, 98).
hTolstoy is a magnificent writer," Joyce wrote in 1905.
"He is
never dull, never stupid, never pedantic, never theatrical.
He is head
and shoulders over the others."
"A writer in the Illustrated London
News." continues Joyce in the same letter, "sneers at Tolstoy for not
understanding WAR .... 00 they think the author of Resurrection and Anna
Karenin is a fool? Does this impudent, dishonourable journalist think he
is the equal of Tolstoy, physically. intellectually, artistically or
morally?" (Joyce, Letters, II, 106, 107). Dostoevsky, on the other hand,
is conspicuously absent from Joyce's letters or other autobiographical
wri tings.
Even what we know of Joyce's library reveals a clear-cue
preference for Tolstoy's works:
by 1920 Joyce apparenely had ten
different volumes by Tolstoy (including Anna Karenina and Resurrection)
and only two by Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment and Idioe) (Ellmann,
Consciousness of Joyce, 107, 130-131).J
Joyce credited Tolstoy with
giving him ideas for interior monologue 4 but what appealed to him most-and what he could not have learnt from Dostoevsky--was that Tolstoy, like
Homer, could grati.fy his reader with presenting a "complete man," a man
2S ee Ellmann' s James Joyce. where Ellmann supports his statement that
Tolstoy was "the novelist (Joyce) liked best" (I::llmann, James Joyce, 4-5), and
John Henry Raleigh's "Joyce and Tolstoy."
31n Conversations with James Joyce, Arthur Power tells us that Joyce praised
Dostoevsky as being "the man more than any other who has created modern prose,
and intensified it to its present-day pitch." He also attributes to Joyce the
statement that Dostoevsky "was always enamoured of violence, which makes him so
modern" (Power, 58, 59). Yet the wording of both statements is so unlike Joyce,
who was much more apt to make fun of such pretentious pronouncements than to make
them, that one tends not to trust Power's memory altogether. I am more inclined
to believe Samuel Beckett's account of Joyce's dispute with his son on the value
of Doseoevsky:
"Giorgio liked to display in argument an obseinacy of the same
weave as his father's, informing him for example that the greatest novelist was
Dostoevski, the greatest novel Crime and Punishment. His faeher said only that
it was a queer title for a book which contained neither crime nor punishmenc"
(quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, 485).
4Shklovsky's remark on Tolstoy's unfinished work, "Tale of Yesterday," is
quite interesting in this respect:
"The interior monologue contradicts the
exterior monologue.
If Tolsc:oy had finished his thing, we would have (had]
before us a book similar to the one Joyce was going to write many decades later"
(quoted in English in Flaker, 198).
79
in his happiness as well as in his sorrow; in his coming into the world
as well as in his leaving it".
A man as a son and as a fa ther, as a
husband and as a lover, as a hero and as a cuckold.
For Joyce there was
nothing "too literal" in Tolstoy's reflecting life this way.
Nabokov also considered Tolstoy the greatest of all prose
writers, and were he alive today, he would undoubtedly argue with his
compatriot that it was Tolstoy and not Dostoevsky who was spiritually and
artistically close to modern sensibilities.
In all of Dostoevsky's
oeuvres Nabokov singled out his early and Gogolesque "The Double" as
worthy of admiration, dismissing the rest as reading for "schoolboys and
schoolgirls" and complaining that Dostoevsky's "devices appear co me, when
compared to Tolstoy's methods, like blows of a club instead of the light
touch of an artist'S fingers" (Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Lieerature,
109, 128).
"Bedlam turned back into Bethlehem - tha t' s Dos toevski for
you," is Fyodor's famous verdict in The Gift (Gife, 8Li).
Usually wary of political, religious or ideological messages in
literature, Nabokov, on the one hand, condemned Dostoevsky for "blood and
tears and hysterical and topical politics" (Nabokov) Lectures, 141),
while, on the ocher, he found it easy to forgive Tolstoy's brand of
moralizing.
In Tolstoy. he thought, the artist simply overpowered the
preacher:
"(H) is ideology was so tame and so vague and so far from
politics, and ... his art was so powerful. so tiger bright, so original and
universal that it easily transcends the sermon" (Nabokov, Lectures, 137,
138) .
Whereas Brodsky accuses Tolstoy of begetting social is c real ism,
Nabokov on the contrary thinks of the author of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"
as an actual "forerunner of Russian modernism just before the dull and
conventional Soviet era" (Nabokov, Lectures, 238).
The truth. of course, lies somewhere be tween Brodsky's and
Nabokov's equally partisan pronouncements about the value to European
modernism of the authors they champion.
When Dos toevsky' s "Doub Ie, "
"Notes from the Underground," The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov
were unleashed on the Western world, the works obviously fueled the
modernist preoccupation with consciousness. But Tolstoy'S prose, as this
paper has tried to show, was at lease equally instrumental in shaping
modernist sensibilities, from the writers' awareness of craft and
arei stry 5 to their heightened interest in all aspects of human life.
Fortunately for its readers much of enduring literature rises above
critical attempts at easy dismissals and stark categorizing. One can only
hope that the simplistic and overworked issue of "Dostoevsky or Tolstoy"
will one day be finally put to rest and people like Brodsky will stop
wasting their time on discussions unworthy even of much lesser talents.
~Characteristically, Percy LUbbock's 1921 critical study on The Craft of
Fiction draws more examples out of Tolstoy than of any other prose writer,
including Henry James, whom the critic follows as his mentor.
80
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This paper was presented at the Irish Slavic Conference held at Trinity
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